Doc on New Haven-style pizza in Florida explores how devotee brought the Wooster Street experience to a small town 1300 miles away

Gorman Bechard made the definitive documentary film about New Haven pizza, “Pizza: A Love Story.” Now he’s back for another slice.The new film from Bechard’s What Were We Thinking Films is “Slice of America: Charred in the Florida Sun,” which will have its Connecticut premiere screening Sept. 11 at 7 p.m. at the New Haven Museum and Historical Society. The screening is already sold out, but other local screenings are being planned and the film will get a DVD release in a few months.Who is playing at the 2024 Big E? Here are some of the can’t miss concerts“Slice of America” follows the quixotic dream of James Fantini to create a New Haven-style pizza place in the small town of Stuart, Florida.Fantini grew up in New Haven and in his youth worked at Sally’s Apizza, which with Frank Pepe Pizza Napoletana and Modern Apizza form the hallowed triumvirate of classic New Haven pizza restaurants. Fantini settled into a successful business career in Florida but missed the singular New Haven-style pizza he grew up on, a delicacy famously distinguished by a thin crust that is deliberately charred when it is baked in an authentic brick oven.Fantini’s New Haven Style Apizza opened in 2019, weathered the COVID pandemic, then got national attention from a favorable review by influential pizza critic Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports. Fantini’s has become a mecca for apizza enthusiasts who live on Florida’s Atlantic coast, over 1300 miles from New Haven’s Wooster Street.The documentary shows how devoted Fantini is to the true New Haven pizza experience. For the restaurant’s traditional clam pie, he gets his clams direct from Long Island Sound. He even has Foxon Park soda, the East Haven brand of choice at many Connecticut pizzerias, shipped to Stuart at great expense.“Slice of America” is narrated by local historian Colin Caplan, author of the book “Pizza in New Haven” and the organizer of Taste of New Haven tours and events. We see Caplan driving around Florida looking for an acceptable slice of pizza at a place other than Fantini’s and failing miserably. Caplan also entertains Fantini’s customers with New Haven pizza lore and customs, leading them in the correct Naples pronunciation of the word “apizza” (“ah-beetz”). In the film, Fantini declares that “If you’re gonna put an “A” in front of it, you’ve got to deliver.”Bechard, a New Haven apizza connoisseur of longstanding, says he first became aware of Fantini’s when friends who been to Florida raved about it. He made the trip himself and decided it was worth its own 42-minute documentary. In “Pizza: A Love Story,” Bechard acknowledged New Haven-style pizza places in other parts of the country, particularly Piece Pizzeria and Brewery in Chicago.Fantini’s was just opening when “Pizza: A Love Story” was released, and Bechard says it’s part of a country-wide explosion of New Haven style pizza place. “When we did the film, there were only 30 places. Now there are over 200.” That includes the steady growth of the Sally’s and Pepe’s franchises.“We just found this place last year,” Bechard says of Fantini’s. “I didn’t meet him until last June, though he already knew Colin. It’s a cute town too, very very mellow. It feels like he’s stuck in the 1960s.”Fantini, Bechard and Caplan will all attend the “Slice of America” premiere at New Haven Museum on the 11th and take part in a Q&A following the screening. Pizza from Pepe’s, Sally’s, and Modern will be served at a pre-show event. This is only the second time that the documentary has been screened in public. The world premiere was at a theater in Stuart in July.Bechard has made over 20 films (including some horror films and dramas besides his documentaries) and written half a dozen novels. He’s taken many of his films on the festival circuit, but is choosing a different path for “Slice of America.” He trying to interest streaming channels in the documentary and will be releasing it on DVD in December with bonus content.Bechard’s realization that “Florida is a pizza wasteland” that happens to boast a creditable, bonafide New Haven apizza restaurant may lead to other films.“I’d like to do a series, a fish out of water thing,” he says, about similar cultural or culinary anachronisms.For now, he’s got several other Connecticut-based documentaries in the works: one about Best Video Film & Cultural Center in Hamden, one of the last remaining video stores in the country; one about the ill-fated Powder Ridge Rock Festival that nearly happened in Middlefield in 1970; and a documentary about the old New Haven Clock Company factory building which became the site of a punk rock club and whose inhabitants included an avid skateboarder who constructed a half-pipe ramp in his loft space.“Slice of America: Charred in the Florida Sun” screens on Wednesday, Sept. 11 at 7 p.m. at the New Haven Museum and Historical Society, 114 Whitney Ave., New Haven. More information is at newhavenmuseum.org.

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